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Several Big Tech vendors are designing ARM SoCs as outlined in the recent HN post The Tech Monopolies Go Vertical [1]. The Snapdragon 888 seems to compete with

Several Big Tech vendors are designing ARM SoCs as outlined in the recent HN post The Tech Monopolies Go Vertical [1]. The Snapdragon 888 seems to compete with the Apple A14. I wonder why there isn’t more comparisons between the A14 iPad Air and the M1 MacBook Air. Microsoft’s SQ2 chip for the Surface integrates a better GPU into a Qualcomm based SoC. Perhaps GPU performance is a key differentiator. I find it odd that the 2+4 big.LITTLE A14 isn’t trounced by the 4+4 big.LITTLE Qualcomm SoCs. A dark horse, especially with respect to GPU, is Nvidia after their ARM acquisition. These are interesting times. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25251229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25251229

officeplant 6y ago
What I find the most interesting is Mediatek, who largely gets ignored among the major players. Their affordable SoC's powered the Lenovo Duet into being one of the most compelling affordable Chromebook Tablets of the year. They've also mentioned plans to put more powerful chips into chromebooks in 2021. ARM powered chromebooks run Android apps far better than their x86 cousins plus still include linux support (crostini) which has a growing set of ARM applications every year. I'm pretty excited for where the future of efficient computing is going. Between my M1 Mac Mini and overclocked Pi4 8GB I've managed to sell off and move on from x86 machines for personal use. Interesting times indeed.